Political Wisdom: McCain’s Camp: ‘We Can Still Win This’

Here’s a summary of the smartest new political analysis on the Web:by Gerald F. Seib and Sara Murray

With the longest, most expensive campaign in American history down to its final day, Sen. John McCain’s campaign wants you to know this: He can still win this thing. His “high-spirited” campaign manager, Rick Davis, “late Sunday night made perhaps his final case for John McCain, arguing that the unusual number of still-remaining undecided voters could tip the election to the GOP and that whether those holdouts ultimately vote could prove decisive,” Jonathan Martin of Politico writes. “Though public polls show McCain down” to Sen. Barack Obama in the three contested Western states of Colorado, New Mexico and Nevada, “Davis said the states were tilting their way and could make their task easier…. Davis also singled out three other hotly-contested states, where Obama is also leading in public polls, to argue that McCain could win if he reduced the Democrat’s advantage in urban and suburban Democratic strongholds: Florida, Virginia and Pennsylvania.” The key in the Davis analysis is whether undecided voters show up to vote for Obama, or don’t show up at all. Martin quotes him as saying: “If we see the vote drop below 130 million, you’ll know they didn’t show up.”

Slate’s John Dickerson describes the two candidates’ closing notes this way: “For the last two weeks, McCain has ended his campaign speeches with a call to fight. It’s a passage that first appeared at the end of his acceptance speech in St. Paul. After describing the country’s troubles, McCain pledges to solve them, saying, ‘I am an American, and I choose to fight.’ This line sparks his crowds into roars of approval. McCain then implores people to join with him in the fight for justice, our children, and to fix the economy. Like his campaign, McCain’s message is personal. His presidency will succeed, he says, because it will flow from him—his biography, his sturdy constitution, his sense of honor…. Obama takes voters to the same place but by a different route…Obama concludes his speech with an even longer litany than McCain of what ‘we’ will do together. The message has always opened Obama to the charge that his campaign is a personality cult.” But, Dickerson writes, “Obama presents himself as the candidate carried and sustained by the support of a movement that will continue to exert itself if he wins the White House.” McCain’s vision of his presidency is more personal and “solitary.”The Washington Post’s E.J. Dionne Jr. attributes Obama’s success to opportunities he managed to see that others overlooked. “By creating a new social movement, new forms of political organization, and a sense of excitement and possibility not felt in politics for three decades, he is bidding to become one of the country’s most consequential leaders,” Dionne writes. McCain made his share of mistakes. “He chose Sarah Palin as his running mate, which finally earned him cries of approval from the GOP base but sent moderate voters scurrying Obama’s way,” but “Obama’s most important insight came much earlier: He saw an opening for a young African American senator with brief Washington experience, realizing that the very unlikeliness of his candidacy would enhance its attractiveness.”

Dionne continues, “Obama understood better than any other Democrat that a vast new progressive movement, called into being by antipathy toward Bush and outrage over the Iraq war, was waiting for leadership. Yet Obama knew that the often-irate legions of the blogosphere needed to be fused with a soft-spoken center weary of partisanship and division. It was another unlikely marriage that Obama sanctified.” His “make-or-break” test though was when McCain suspended his campaign and called to postpone the first presidential debate. “Obama quickly rejected McCain’s suggestion, McCain backed down and Obama established himself as a leader. When the debate took place two days later, Obama’s calm, deliberate performance confirmed his leadership skills for millions in the ranks of the uncertain.”

Turning to the logistics, Salon.com’s Alex Koppelman takes stock of the electoral map. “For John McCain, everything seems to hinge on Pennsylvania,” Koppelman concludes. “The good news for McCain is that his campaign’s efforts in the state appear to be paying off, at least to an extent. It’s one place where we actually can say that the polls appear to be tightening, though as Pollster.com’s Mark Blumenthal noted, ‘most of the change in Pennsylvania involves an increase in McCain’s support — from 40.3% to 43.8% — while Obama has lost just a single point on our estimate.’ Obama still remains above 50 percent in most polls there, which means that even a last-minute surge of undecided voters breaking overwhelmingly for the Republican wouldn’t be enough to turn the blue state red.” If McCain did win Pennsylvania though, he’d still be defeated if Obama won Florida, Ohio or “Virginia plus any one of Georgia, Indiana, Missouri, Nevada or North Carolina” or ” North Carolina plus any one of Georgia, Indiana, Missouri, Montana, Nevada, North Carolina, North Dakota or Virginia.” All in all, McCain’s left with a “precarious” road to the White House.

The John McCain of 2000 could have won this election. The problem is that the John McCain of 2000 couldn’t have won the GOP nomination. Your party needs to move away from the Limbaugh/Hannity extreme right which is a vocal minority that does not represent the majority of americans. Thus to put it succinctly, you have nobody to blame but yourselves.

11:30 am November 4, 2008

Conservatives for Change. wrote :

You can try all you want to mislead others, but website http://www.conservatives for change is a sham. This race is not about MCCain or Obama its about were these two will lead us. Our country does not need to change the way Obama wants it to change. He is a socialist and if people would just study history or even some current eventse,of other countries that have tried it, they would know it does not work.Ask any Canadian or Easern European. Oh by the way, I hope you Obama supporters have some good therapist lined up because your moods are going to be swinging from hero to zero around August of 2009 if your Messiah gets into office.

OK i will vote for OBAMA,THAT LINK WAS ALL IT TOOK THANKS I OWE YOU BIGTIME I SEE THE LIGHT I HAVE BEEN SAVED,BORN AGAIN,I WILL TELL YOU THIS LINK TELLS ABOUT HOW BAD MCCAIN IS HE IS A LIAR AND DISHONORABLE LOOKhttp://therealmccain.com/videos.php

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Capital Journal is WSJ.com’s unique site for analysis of the political and policy maneuvering in Washington in the era of Barack Obama. It features the Capital Journal columns and occasional other postings by executive Washington editor Gerald F. Seib, and will house Political Wisdom, the Journal’s daily aggregation of the smartest political analysis from around the Internet. Also look for regular columns by Peter Brown of the Quinnipiac University Polling Institute and occasional contributions from others.